Parasitic Interventions

Oil platforms, Baku, Azerbaijan, 2015. (Armin Linke)

Last week I explored what a parasitic intervention would look like if humans were the parasite to architecture. However, building fabric architectural elements that respond to humans failed. I was still thinking about architecture, humans, and earth in relationship to parasites. Thinking about the definition of parasites as “an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other’s expense.” Architecture is built by extracting the nutrients of the earths expense. I explored three interventions of how architecture is parasitic and how nature has a way of resisting.

Parasitic Intervention 1:

Regardless of how many times we paint over a wall, walls and paint crack due to the humidity of the air. What would happen if these cracks could breath?

Parasitic Intervention 2:

Earth resists the growth of sidewalks by growing through them.

Parasitic Intervention 3:

Construction sites are the process of taking extracted materials and using them to build over nature. However, the wind passing through the scaffolds is a small gesture that nature is still around.